I do not use caching yet. An average run costs less than a dollar I find. I think the most expensive so far may have been 2 dollars or so.

I had similar costs. With caching it went down to 20-40 cents.

Well worth it, if you are using this regularly.

Okay I have token caching and token costing implemented in a PR. Will go live tomorrow. Thanks for the suggestion!

Wait, running this once costs "less than a dollar" but up to 2 dollars?

So if I used this all day it could cost me 100s of dollars? How is that a good deal when Claude costs 20 dollars per month?

When I use it heavily for a work day it costs around $25 a day.

It will write whole features and debug things and write tests and docs. It is that valuable.

I’ve started to run two sessions at once to be more productive. I will be moving it to the cloud soon so I can run dozens of sessions at the same time.

Tech like this replaces human developers for the most part so yes it is worth it. $25/day is cheaper than hiring another dev or two.

Development teams are coming to an end right now.

Claude already does all those things.

Also, Claude is already so good at coding, that anyone could clone your "MyCoder" in less than a day. Which makes sense, given you yourself made it using Claude.

Basically, any dev with a small amount of experience can make their own coding software now, without much issue, because the AI tools are so good.

So why should anyone use "MyCoder"?

Does this argument apply to claude-code and aider? Or just tools I write?

Does your argument apply to all software libraries/products?

Can you say more about the type of work? How big are those repositories? Thanks

I had it fix a bug recently in the medium sized tanstack mono repo. Transcript here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43178222

I saw that, I was more interested in other examples you might have since you said that you have started to run two sessions at once to be more productive. And this bug doesn't look like such workload.

The issue is I am working on non-public projects so it is harder to share. But I have a mono-repo that has 8 packages in the packages/* folder and it is all managed by pnpm. I had two sessions going locally in two separate terminal windows in cursor. One was modifying 2 packages to add a feature and another session was modifying another package that was orthogonal to the first two.

This isn't really professional - it felt wrong - one shouldn't be adding two separate features at once, but because they were isolated I could check them in separately into Git as two separate commits.

It was as if two coders were working on the same checked out code.

I need to move this into a cloud service and that is coming soon.

Ping me at ben@benhouston3d.com and I can show you some live demos. It works incredibly well.

> This isn't really professional - it felt wrong

I don't see anything wrong with that tbh. If it works that's great since this means that you're bound by the compute power you have and not the amount of devs available at that moment. I guess this is what the wet dream is about.

Working on two features at once is not weird pre-llms too. Though it's a scheduling problem rather than parallelism. CI tests are running for feature A while you work on feature B. If feature A fails, at some point you context switch back and work on it more etc

Of course, business incentive is to have people complete as much stuff as they can per time unit. I don't think I ever had a luck to work in an environment where anyone in the team wouldn't be working on multiple things at the same time. Truth to be told these weren't the traditional scrum or any other bs driven environment. More like high performance teams where pretty much anyone was quite exquisite.

I really should have just checked out the code twice locally or once per auto coder.

If using Anthropic professionally with, e.g., Cline, it's easy to spend $1500 a week.

Whoa. That is insane. I will have to try it out to see why it is so much more expensive.

For a team of 1,500 people? :)

A few dollars??? What are those sessions doing ? How do you define a "session"

How can it be worth it in anyway except for FAANG engineers in the US ?

I spent about five hours using Claude Code heavily yesterday to upgrade and enhance a four year old React web app. This app is widely used to reference anatomical nomenclature.

I was able to internationalize it for 45 major languages across the world (still subject to human testing). That allows it to be accessible for 85-90% of the world's population.

It cost me about $50. It saved me months of work on a "labor of love" project and allowed me to add lots of quality of life features in a single day that I just never would have gotten to otherwise.

That's an enormous value for me.

I'm building a startup. Saving hours for singular dollars is incredibly valuable.

A session in the parent comment is like building a set of changes that would usually take a few hours (but instead takes like 30 minutes of using Claude Code (reviewing, prompting etc) and 30 minutes of cleaning up).

A few hours also being what it would have taken using some combination of building it entirely myself and/or copy/pasting with Claude where it would save time.

On average I've been spending $25 a day on Claude credits once this was up and fully running. That is cheaper than hiring another developer in just about any country and it greatly boosts my productivity.

If you use threads / chains of messages in any form, I strongly encourage you to checkout caching. The cost savings are crazy. ($0.05 / cache read 1M tokens instead of $3 / 1M input tokens)

Okay I have token caching annd token costing implemented in a PR. Will go live tomorrow. Thanks for the suggestion!

Isn't it much cheaper to just use CoPilot with GPT-o?

Claude I find is significantly better at coding that OpenAI tech, especially in agentic tool using workflows.